Five Israeli-Arabs were arrested Sunday in the Arab village of Um el-Fahm just hours after it was released for publication that a young Israeli-Arab woman was arrested for planning a bombing.

The entire Wadi Ara region of north-central Israel, where Um el-Fahm is located, was placed on high alert Sunday due to intelligence information that a terror cell was hiding in the Israeli-Arab villages in the region. Heavy traffic resulted, as police set up checkpoints along major arteries and checked all vehicles leaving the villages.

Another resident of Um el-Fahm, Ahmed Mohammed Mahmid, was arrested in recent weeks for burning vehicles belonging to local Arab residents he suspected of assisting Israeli security forces.

Mahmid confessed to the crimes, but claimed the vandalism was not driven by ideological motives, but because he blamed the owners of the cars for the death of his friend.

The Um El-Fahm arrests were announced the same day that Yisrael Beiteinu joined the government coalition. The party’s chairman, MK Avigdor Lieberman, has called for the revocation of the citizenship of Israeli-Arabs in Wadi Ara and and the transfer of control of those villages to the PA. In exchange, Israel would annex Jewish populated areas in Judea and Samaria.

It was released on Sunday for publication that a 20-year-old Israeli-Arab female terrorist was arrested before she could place a bomb in a Raanana restaurant. She had been working in an Israeli supermarket in a Jewish neighborhood and her cousin, who was from PA-controlled Shechem (Nablus), had in the past been employed illegally at the very restaurant they sought to bomb.

This entry was posted
on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 and is filed under news.